3 days to $1.135B in emergency relief.
When the pandemic hit, a $50B bank had to move thousands of businesses into a federal relief program almost overnight. The strategy was never in doubt. The whole job was execution.
A program announced on Monday that businesses needed by Friday.
In March 2020, the federal government launched CEBA — emergency loans to keep businesses alive through the first lockdown. For Alberta's businesses, ATB Financial was the front door. Thousands of them needed to apply, qualify, and receive funds in days, through digital channels, while call centres were already overwhelmed.
The leadership decision was easy: get the money out. The hard part was everything after the decision — a working application path, identity and eligibility checks, and a way to absorb volume that would have buried a phone queue. This was not a strategy problem. It was an execution problem with a deadline measured in days.
Treat the launch as a 72-hour delivery.
Reframe the deadline in days, not quarters.
We stopped treating it as a project with a roadmap and started treating it as a delivery with hours on the clock. Scope was whatever a business needed to apply and get approved — nothing else.
Repurpose the platform we already had.
Rather than build something new under pressure, we turned the existing digital customer onboarding and origination platform into the application path — bending proven infrastructure to a brand-new job.
Keep executives aligned in real time.
As SME and trusted advisor, I kept the executive and senior teams aligned as decisions moved hour to hour — so approvals never waited on a meeting that hadn't been scheduled yet.
Ship, then harden under live volume.
The platform went live in 3 days. From there the work was monitoring, hardening, and scaling as application volume climbed — keeping the path open while the numbers grew.
What got delivered.
in CEBA emergency relief flowed to Alberta businesses through the platform.
businesses signed up and funded — onboarded digitally, not by phone.
from go-decision to a live application path, recognized internally for its speed.
call-centre work days eliminated — $150K+ saved while protecting client retention and reputation.
The same operating muscle showed up across the rest of that tenure. Weeks earlier we'd launched the ATB Personal mobile app — 180,000 users across 2.8 million sessions in its first month, with the app store rating climbing from 1.3 to 4.4. Different surface, same discipline: decide, ship, then scale under real load.
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